I have been a scientist in the field of the earth and environmental sciences for 33 years, specializing in geologic disposal of nuclear waste, energy-related research, subsurface transport and environmental clean-up of heavy metals. I consult on strategic planning for the DOE, EPA/State environmental agencies, and industry including companies that own nuclear, hydro, wind farms, large solar arrays, coal and gas plants. I also consult for EPA/State environmental agencies and industry on clean-up of heavy metals from soil and water. For over 20 years I have been a member of Sierra Club, Greenpeace, the NRDC, the Environmental Defense Fund and many others, as well as professional societies including the America Nuclear Society, the American Chemical Society and the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.

Like We've Been Saying -- Radiation Is Not A Big Deal

The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation has finally admitted that we can't use the LNT hypothesis to predict cancer from low doses of radiation. Now the Japanese people can start eating their own food again and stop being as afraid. Source: United Nations

A very big report came out last month with very little fanfare. It concluded what we in nuclear science have been saying for decades – radiation doses less than about 10 rem (0.1 Sv) are no big deal. The linear no-threshold dose hypothesis (LNT) does not apply to doses less than 10 rem (0.1 Sv), which is the region encompassing background levels around the world, and is the region of most importance to nuclear energy, most medical procedures and most areas affected by accidents like Fukushima.

The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) (UNSCEAR 2012) submitted the report that, among other things, states that uncertainties at low doses are such that UNSCEAR “does not recommend multiplying low doses by large numbers of individuals to estimate numbers of radiation-induced health effects within a population exposed to incremental doses at levels equivalent to or below natural background levels.” (UNDOC/V1255385)

You know, like everyone’s been doing since Chernobyl. Like everyone’s still doing with Fukushima.

Finally, the world may come to its senses and not waste time on the things that aren’t hurting us and spend time on the things that are. And on the people that are in real need. Like the infrastructure and economic destruction wrought by the tsunami, like cleaning up the actual hot spots around Fukushima, like caring for the tens of thousands of Japanese living in fear of radiation levels so low that the fear itself is the only thing that is hurting them, like seriously preparing to restart their nuclear fleet and listening to the IAEA and the U.S. when we suggest improvements.

The advice on radiation in this report will clarify what can, and cannot, be said about low dose radiation health effects on individuals and large populations. Background doses going from 250 mrem (2.5 mSv) to 350 mrem (3.5 mSv) will not raise cancer rates or have any discernable effects on public health. Likewise, background doses going from 250 mrem (2.5 mSv) to 100 mrem (1 mSv) will not decrease cancer rates or effect any other public health issue.

Note – although most discussions are for acute doses (all at once) the same amount as a chronic dose (metered out over a longer time period like a year) is even less effecting. So 10 rem (0.1 Sv) per year, either as acute or chronic, has no observable effect, while 10 rem per month might.

UNSCEAR also found no observable health effects from last year’s nuclear accident in Fukushima. No effects.

The Japanese people can start eating their own food again, and moving back into areas only lightly contaminated with radiation levels that are similar to background in many areas of the world like Colorado and Brazil.

The huge waste of money that is passing for clean-up now by just moving around dirt and leaves (NYTimes) can be focused on clean-up of real contamination near Fukushima using modern technologies. The economic and psychological harm wrought by the wrong-headed adoption of linear no-threshold dose effects for doses less than 0.1 Sv (10 rem) has been extremely harmful to the already stressed population of Japan, and to continue it would be criminal.

To recap LNT, the Linear No-Threshold Dose hypothesis is a supposition that all radiation is deadly and there is no dose below which harmful effects will not occur. Double the dose, double the cancers. First put forward after WWII by Hermann Muller, and adopted by the world body, including UNSCEAR, its primary use was as a Cold War bargaining chip to force cessation of nuclear weapons testing. The fear of radiation that took over the worldview was a side-effect (Did Muller Lie?).

Background Radiation Differences on Annual Cancer Mortality Rates/100,000 for each U.S. State over a 17-Year Period. There is no correlation with radiation dose. States with significantly higher doses, greater than 2.7 mSv/year (270 mrem/year) like Colorado, have lower cancer rates than States with much lower average doses like Georgia, and vice versa. (from Frigerio and Stowe, 1976 with recent radon data)

Of course, doubling the dose doesn’t double the cancers below 10 rem/yr (0.1 Sv/yr). It has no effect at all. The millions of nuclear workers that have been monitored closely for 50 years have no higher cancer mortality than the general population but have had several to ten times the average dose. People living in New Mexico and Wyoming have twice the annual dose as those in Los Angeles, but have lower cancer rates. These cannot occur if LNT were true, because LNT states this could not occur.

There are no observable effects in any population group around the planet that suggest LNT is true below 10 rem/yr (0.1 Sv/yr) even in areas of the Middle East, Brazil and France where natural background doses exceed 10 rem/yr (0.1 Sv/yr).

Although rarely discussed, LNT does not take into account the organisms immune system, biological recovery time between doses or other relevant mechanisms that operate at low doses on an actual organism versus cells in a petri dish.

UNSCEAR is an independent body of international experts that has met regularly since 1955 and helped establish radiation as the best understood, though weakest, carcinogenic agent in the world through its studies of atomic bomb survivors, the effects of the Chernobyl accident, industrial radiological accidents, and medical radiation treatment.

Many of us have been at them for years to stop procrastinating and prevaricating on something so important that the inaction itself is harmful. This report is a welcome change. The report, approved by the United Nations General Assembly, will now serve to guide all countries of the world in setting their own national radiation safety policies.

This is incredibly important to Japan where national guideline changes have been horribly over-reactive in response to Fukushima, especially for food, using LNT in a way it should not be used.

Accepted global limits on radioactivity levels in foods is 1000 Bq/kg (1,200 Bq/kg in the U.S.). Dominated by cesium-137 and Sr-90, these levels were set by organizations like the IAEA and UNSCEAR after decades of study. Because of public radiation fears broadcast in the press after the Fukushima accident, Japan cut the limit in half hoping it would have a calming influence. But the level of fear remained high, so Tokyo lowered the limits to one-tenth of the international standards.

This was supposed to induce calm? Telling the public that radiation is even more deadly than they thought? That their food is toxic? Were they nuts?

This has had the unintended consequence of making people even more afraid of what they are eating, moving safe foods into the scary category and limiting food exports, causing even further economic and social damage.

Suddenly, all sorts of normally safe foods are now banned. Wild mushrooms from Aomori Prefecture are now banned because they have cesium levels of about 120 Bq/kg. This cesium has nothing to do with Fukushima, it’s the same type as is in everyone’s food around the world, and it wouldn’t have rated a second look before the accident (Japan’s Contamination Limits Way Too Low).

The Japanese people should not be punished for nothing. But these new results and the UNSCEAR reports demonstrate that they are being punished. There was no reason to lower the rad limits on food, especially after the short-lived nuclides have long decayed away. One of the incorrect assumptions was that people in Japan would be eating only contaminated food, which is quite wrong. The international limits were set for very good reasons, lowering them makes no sense except to further hurt farmers and consumers in Japan.

UNSCEAR’s chair Wolfgang Weiss stated that no radiation health effects had been observed in Japan among the public, workers or children in the area of the damaged nuclear power plants, in keeping with studies already published by the World Health Organization and Tokyo University. Doses of radiation received by people near the damaged power plant were so low that no discernible health effect could be expected.

The Japanese government, for all its failures, did the right thing in evacuating Fukushima Prefecture quickly and by preventing contaminated food and water from being consumed. This was in stark contrast to Chernobyl where the Soviets intentionally kept the public in the dark.

Ingestion of the short-lived isotope iodine-131, with its well-known risk of thyroid cancer when absorbed in the thyroid glands of children and young people, was the only major radiation-related health effect of the Chernobyl accident on the public. And the Soviets could have prevented that by acting quickly and openly. Of course, the Soviets didn’t much care about the public.

This will not happen in Japan. Iodine-131, with a half-life of only 8 days, decayed away in a few months following the accident and no one was found to have ingested any significant amount.

According to the reports, six Fukushima workers received total doses of over 0.25 Sv (25 rem) during their time fighting the emergency, while 170 workers received doses between 0.1 and 0.25 Sv (10 to 25 rem). None have shown ill effects and most likely never will. Radiation played no role in the coincidental deaths of six Fukushima workers in the time since the accident, who died from accidents, e.g., being crushed by debris or being swept out to sea.

Yes, there are health effects of radiation above 0.1 Sv (10 rem) that statistically increase up to 1 Sv (100 rem) but even in this higher range it’s hard to see them without a big enough population. The only radiation events on this scale, where large populations received 0.1 Sv (10 rem) to 1 Sv (100 rem) have been the atomic bomb blasts from World War II.

The effects of radiation only start to become clear at high acute absorbed doses of over 1 Sv (100 rem), and even then it is necessary to eliminate other potential causes before radiation can be unequivocally said to be the cause, advised UNSCEAR.

What this means for nuclear waste disposal is even more dramatic, but more on that later!

In the end, if we don’t reorient ourselves on what is true about radiation and not on the fear, we will fail the citizens of Japan, Belarus and the Ukraine, and we will continue to spend time and money on the wrong things. I’m sure the anti-nuke ideologues and conspiracy theorists will not accept these U.N. reports, but then…they don’t like the United Nations anyway.

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LNT is empirically supported by many peer-reviewed articles. Here is very-very limited list of them. I hope you educate yourself. I also kindly attached “basic” materials to learn epidemiology at the bottom.

*A-bomb survivors (acute exposure) http://www.rerf.jp/library/rr_e/rr1104.pdf The sex-averaged Excess relative risk per Gy was 0.42 [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.32, 0.53] for all solid cancer at age 70 years after Exposure at age 30 based on a linear model. The risk Increased by about 29% per decade decrease in age at exposure (95% CI: 17%, 41%). The estimated lowest dose range with a significant ERR for all solid cancer was 0 to 0.20 Gy, and a formal dose-threshold analysis indicated no threshold; i.e., zero dose was the best estimate of the threshold.

*A meta-analysis of leukemia risk from protracted exposure to low-dose gamma radiation (protracted) http://oem.bmj.com/content/68/6/457.full We found an ERR at 100 mGy of 0.19 (95% CI 0.07 to 0.32) by modeling results from 10 studies and adjusting for publication bias.

If you are unfamiliar with statistics or epidemiology, and if you have enough politeness to understand knowledge body on the filed, I recommend the following sites.

Open course offered by Harvard Public health. The course is closing, but you can register and learn much. https://www.edx.org/courses/HarvardX/PH207x/2012_Fall/about

By the way, as far as I know there is no Tokyo University in Japan. I guess you mean Univ. of Tokyo? I recommend you to examine very carefully before you post, and I also recommend you to indicate citation(s) properly if you have one.

yutaka: LNT at low doses (<0.1 Sv) is a model that is inconsistent with biologic and experimental data. LNT does not account for an organism's defense mechanisms which vary widely with dose and dose rate. No convincing epidemiologic data support the LNT relationship at low doses.

Epidemiological data have been found to be inaccurate at low doses (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9402638?dopt=Abstract).

Low dose data used in epidemiological studies can be made to fit a linear response relationship, a linear quadratic response relationship, a quadratic response relationship, a threshold somewhere between 40 and 60 mSv, or even a hormetic response relationship. (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00411-006-0030-y)

Yes, LNT was useful for radiation protection guidelines in the 1950s. It is no longer useful as a basis for radiation protection guidelines today.

How many people in Japan and the USSR have died, became diseased and had their way of life disrupted by following LNT-based radiation protection guidelines?

Why is it necessary to continue to follow the tradition of LNT when it causes an irrational fear of radiation?

Radiation Protection should be based on science not tradition or politics.

yutaka: I don’t think the meta-analysis that you cite lends any support to LNT. Meta-analyses rely on pre-existing studies instead of original data. That means any flaws in the original studies such as the uncontrolled confounders are magnified in the meta-analysis. They also only report amplified positive effects that support their premise not the small or non-effects typically left out of the pre-existing studies.

To CHP1: Contained in your comment directed at me, you included the following economist.com article ( http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2012/08/japan-and-atom) published in April of ’12 and states that a draft report of the Fukushima Health Management Survey Group finds NO evidence of thyroid problems.

Interesting that the same ongoing study, Fukushima Health Management Survey Group, finds in its 6th report (released in April of ’12) , a drastic increase to 36% of Fukushima children presenting with tumors, nodules and abnormalities. See this link: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/9410702/Nearly-36pc-of-Fukushima-children-diagnosed-with-thyroid-growths.html

Before you post, you should at least check other sources for the same topic. I have lived through this in Japan. Now the numbers of children are nearing 43% and yet, mainstream medicine “doesn’t know why”.

This is what happens when you discount internal contamination from food, which the pro-nuke folks in this group continuously claim the levels as being, “no threat to the general public” or “negligible”.

cathy: You’re misinterpreting the article. Nowhere in the article does it state that there is “a drastic increase to 36% of Fukushima children presenting with tumors, nodules and abnormalities”. It actually reports that:

“36 percent of children in Fukushima Prefecture have been disgnosed with growths on their thyroids, although doctors insist there is no link between the “cluster” of incidents and the disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in March of last year.”

Thyroid growths/nodules are extremely common in young adults and children. Almost 50% of people have had one. Usually these nodules are only detected by a GP during the course of a health examination, or through a different affliction. However, mass thyroid screenings of the Japanese population after the Fukushima accident would also detect these nodules and other growths.

I understand how difficult it must have been to go through this in Japan. However, mainstream medicine doesn’t know why thyroid nodules develop in anyone no matter where they live.

It’s well known that the latency period for radiation induced thyroid cancer is about 10 years. Perhaps you should also consider the millions of people (including children) all over the world each year that receive thyroid radiation dose from radioactive medical diagnostic procedures. They have many times more dose to the thyroid than any member of the public at Fukushima yet there is no concern that they have a higher risk of thyroid cancer. So please explain why you know that these nodules found in the Japanese population are due to the relatively minor dose from radioactive iodine released during the Fukushima accident?

Patricia Lewis: Apparently, your comment was not “called out” as I cannot locate in this forum your comment on why you have had 100-150 mSv exposure for the last 19 years.

It’s important to bear in mind that you are 59…NOT 12 and 16, as are my children. You, for the most part, are also probably not ingesting as much radioactive food as is being circulated in the food supply in Japan. As we know from the BEIR studies, external exposure affects children much, much more than adults and women much more than men….and girls much more than boys.

The overt serving of radioactive food in school lunches in Japan and the diluting of radioactive milk from Fukushima with other milk so that it passes national standards is one such example of the way we sacrifice our children for the greater good of “profit”. See this article: http://www.fukushima311watchdogs.org/share.php?partager=2206

I personally experienced this in Japan at my 6th grade daughter’s elementary school, after researching the ingredients in the school lunches and where they were sourced. I found that only 60% of the ingredients were procurred locally, while 40 percent came from areas in Northeastern Japan…close to Tokyo and Fukushima. I opted out of the lunch program, choosing instead to send my daughter with a homemade lunch of locally harvested ingredients. After working there for 10 years as an English teacher, I was told not to share my research with the PTA or mother friends as it would cause “panic” and my daughter was made to lie that she had food allergies, thus the homemade lunch.

I am in no way a conspiracy theorist, but if you think for a moment that the US raising the levels of “safe” contamination in our food to 1200 Bq/kg….albeit quietly without announcement in mainstream media…(Japan’s is 100 Bq/kg) and that this has nothing to do with Fukushima fallout, you’ve got to be kidding yourselves. Don’t think for a moment that our public schools and local gov’ts won’t resort to the same “all is well and it’s safe” tactics that Japan has done. The difference in the US, is that a small percentage care enough to get to the truth, spread this data, and make changes in our communities.

Cathy, from my business: http://www.radonmine.com is why I have the ‘high’ annual exposure. I also live in a higher elevation. My exposure is from radon inhalation in addition to our well water source which travels through granite rock structures. Our facility was Montana’s first uranium mine – small and short lived for that purpose. I always find it confounding that when low dose radiation is discussed, one should be specific about levels of exposure, types of radiation etc. Apples and apples…. Oh, and well actually, I was in the 8th grade when I started working during the summers at the business that I now own. My father in his teens, worked here before that and his father was the mining engineer who discovered the uranium at this location…. non-significant as compared to others in other situations… thanks for asking.

cathy: Who told you that the US raised the level of radioactivity in food to 1200 Bq/kg? That level was established 15 years ago. The fact is that the Japanese recently lowered that level to 100 Bq/kg.

Even if you accept LNT (which is not supported by scientific evidence at these low dose rates), the 1200 Bq/kg theoretically will increase the number of cancer deaths from 1900 to 1902 in a population of 10,000 individuals eating food with that radioactivity level over a lifetime. That’s 366 theoretical deaths per year for a population of 128,000,000 people of Japan (128,000,000 individuals x 2 deaths / 10,000 individuals / 70 year lifetime).

That’s 816 more real deaths per year in Japan due to the replacement of nuclear power! And you’re worried about less than half as many theoretical deaths from additional radioactivity in food?

To any reasonable person, it would seem your efforts are misplaced. It appears you’re sacrificing your children and other people’s children for your unsubstantiated fear of radiation.

If you really wanted what’s best for your own children and the children of Japan, you would fight hard not only to get those shutdown nuclear units back on-line but fight even harder to replace all fossil fuels with new nuclear generation.

And if you don’t think that the coal, natural gas and oil industries are profiting greatly from the shutdown of nuclear in Japan, then your living in a fantasy world. And you’re helping them do it without even knowing it. They’re laughing at you all the way to the bank!